XBS Learns to Grow

Xerox Business Services (XBS) isn't a young company. (In fact, it's 40 years old.) It isn't a flashy, high-tech company. (It'll manage your documents and do your copying.) But it's a fast company.

XBS is rocking the Document Company: it is the fastest-growing, fastest-moving part of Xerox -- going global, growing at 40% per year, hitting the $1 billion mark, carving out a corporate culture that's full of energy, imagination, and learning. What makes XBS a fast-company-inside-an-old-company is its three-year-old change strategy -- an ambitious, unorthodox menu of events and experiences designed to transform a 15,000-person, widely dispersed organization into a cohesive learning organization.

XBS's approach to change is dramatically different from most others. There's no senior change team, no formal change program, no big-budget activities, no specific performance goals. Instead, the mind-set is experimental, inclusive, organic, almost playful. Through a seemingly endless series of simulations, seminars, events, and experiences -- all carefully designed to reinforce a simple message to employees about the value of learning -- XBS has created an environment that not only produces business results but also supports personal growth.

All this in a company that's growing like gangbusters. XBS is the world leader in document outsourcing; it has more than 4,000 customers in 36 countries -- customers like Intel, Microsoft, General Electric, Motorola, Lufthansa, and Texas Instruments -- and it provides services to as many as 4 million businesspeople per day. XBS uses so much paper (it rivals the U.S. government as the most prodigious user in the country) that it could paper over the Grand Canyon once a month with the documents it produces, handles, and distributes. Its services run the gamut from managing documents for customers to taking over whole mailrooms, from designing a company's overall document-processing strategy to meeting the unanticipated document needs that arise at a convention or sporting event.

The leader of this unusual -- and unusually effective -- change effort is Chris Turner, XBS's Learning Person, a 15-year XBS veteran who started her career as a sales representative, then worked as a sales manager and a general manager before moving to the unit's Rochester headquarters four years ago. This year she won the prestigious Xerox President's Award for contributions to the corporation. Turner's experimental approach to change intentionally involves a menu of thinking, from Peter Senge to Stephen Covey, designed to let XBSers choose and use the learning style that works for them.

Two of Turner's most visible innovations involve selecting three XBS centers as "learning laboratories" (profiled in "Seattle Walks the Talk") and a company summer-camp-like experience (described in "Camp Diary").

In her Texas twang -- and with a down-to-earth manner -- Turner describes the XBS change strategy as "creating a community of inquirers and learners. A change strategy doesn't have to be about changing people," she insists, "because everything is already there. It's about creating conditions where it can all come out." Fast Company interviewed Turner in her Rochester office.

For most companies, change is part of a downsizing or reengineering. What's driving the change strategy at XBS?

Our rate of growth. When I started with XBS in 1981, we had maybe 3,000 people. Today we have almost 15,000 people. By the end of this century, we'll have between 30,000 and 40,000 people. It took us 40 years to get to $1 billion. It'll take us two years to get to $2 billion, and two more years to get to $5 billion.

On top of that, XBS is essentially a virtual organization. You have to understand our business to understand our challenges. More than 80% of our people work at customer sites rather than XBS facilities. And those sites vary from customers where we've got one operator with just one copying machine to 200 operators with 2,000 machines.

Why does growth -- success -- require you to change?

When you're growing this fast, the most important issue you have to contend with is organizational knowledge. We're bringing in tons of new people, and the people we already have are constantly changing jobs to keep up with growth. That creates three big issues. First, we've got business context issues. What kind of business do we have? Second, we've got community issues. How can our people participate in this large, unwieldy thing we call XBS? And third, we've got skills issues. What are the knowledge and infrastructure systems we need to develop?

And all of this translates into teaching people to learn?